Death in Little Tokyo

15

The next morning Mariko took off for work and I tried calling Angela Sanchez. The phone rang for a long time before it was answered.

“Habla.” A man’s voice: Latino, gruff, and sounding a bit older.

“I’d like to speak to Angela Sanchez, please.”

“Who the hell are you?” Anger and heavily accented English.

Surprised, I said, “I beg your pardon? I’d just like to speak to Miss Sanchez.”

“Angela is my mujer. Why are you calling her? She’s not here. Who are you?” Real anger now. The man was almost shouting.

It seemed kind of stupid, but I politely said, “Well, I’ll call back. Thanks for your help.” I hung up. What help? Damned if I know, but politeness can sometimes be an irritating habit.

Wondering what to do next, I went out to the car and got out the Thomas Brothers map guide, the bible for anyone who drives in Los Angeles. I looked up Angela Sanchez’s address and saw it was in East L.A. I decided to pay a visit.

First I swung by Little Tokyo and stopped at Fugetsu-Do. Fugetsu-Do is the oldest Japanese confectioner’s shop in L.A. It’s been in the same family for almost a century and they make what are positively the best manju (Japanese pastries) in town. I bought a nice assortment and watched as the clerk put them in a box and carefully wrapped the box with paper. Then she patiently tied a red ribbon around the box and presented it to me. She did this on every purchase, and if I had remembered to tell her this was a gift she’d have used gift paper.

I stopped by the boutique and gave the box to Mrs. Kawashiri, along with my thanks for setting up the meeting with Mrs. Okada. Ongiri again.

Mrs. Kawashiri recognized the Fugetsu-Do paper immediately, and after insisting that setting up the meeting was nothing, she looked at the box and said, “Yumm! Can I look at them?”

“Of course. I hope you’ll do more than look at them. With all the pastries you’ve given me I owe you more than a few treats.”

Mrs. Kawashiri opened the wrapping paper and took the lid off the box. “My favorites! You have George’s favorites, too.” George was Mr. Kawashiri. There is only a limited selection of manju, so when you buy a large assortment it’s hard not to have people’s favorites in it.

Happy that my small kindness was a success, I went back to my car and drove to East L.A. and Angela Sanchez’s address.

East L.A. is the modern Latino heartland of Los Angeles. Of course, in the two-hundred-year history of the city, Los Angeles has always been primarily a Latino city, but it’s becoming even more so because of a flood of recent immigration. Even the former African-American bastion of Watts is now more than 50 percent Latino. Despite the spread of Latinos in Los Angeles, East L.A. is still special. It’s where you find Latino families who have lived four generations in the same neighborhood, and who have true roots in both California and Mexico. Its blue-collar Mexican-American population is an amalgam of two cultures, just like I am.

There are some aspects of Latino culture that mirror Japanese culture. Both cultures share a respect for tradition, both are family oriented, and both make a virtue of hard work. Yet despite the admirable traits of Latino culture, for a significant minority of Latinos in Los Angeles, something has gone wrong. The respect for tradition has been transformed into a bastardized collection of gang signs, graffiti, and special gang clothing. The focus on family has been turned into a travesty that encourages the creation of large gangs or “crews” of taggers (organized graffiti vandals). The willingness to engage in hard work has become a fountainhead for endless criminal activity, both great and small, and mostly dealing with drugs.

The result is hundreds, if not thousands, of Latino gangs in Los Angeles. Gangs are not just a Latino phenomena, of course, because there are also Anglo gangs, African-American gangs, and Asian gangs in Los Angeles. Crime seems to be an equal opportunity employer, although you rarely hear of a racially mixed gang. It’s sad. It’s also dangerous because gangs not only fight each other, they also prey on citizens of all races in the city.

I was mindful of this as I drove into the East L.A. neighborhood where Angela Sanchez lived. You’d have to be a fool not to be aware of it when you drive into neighborhoods strange to you in this city. In Angela’s neighborhood the walls of almost every business were scarred with gang graffiti, along with many homes and apartment buildings. Groups of young men, some of them in gang-banger clothes, stood around on street corners engaging in mock fights and passing time. At minimarts banks of pay phones were arrayed outside, and better dressed youths stood waiting by the phones. Drug dealers waiting for their beepers to go off so they could buy and sell using public (and presumably untapped) phones.

A few stubborn residents maintained their houses with neat front lawns and graffiti-free walls. Even these bastions of middle-class normalcy exhibited the effects of the decline in the neighborhood because they invariably had bars on the windows and some even had fortified, wrought iron screen doors; the honest jailed in a desperate effort to keep out the predators that roamed free in the neighborhood.

Angela’s address was an apartment building with four units. The street was strange because one side of the street had four- to six-unit apartments and the other side had single family residences. Angela’s apartment seemed to be in pretty good shape, but the same couldn’t be said for all the apartments on the block. Several had graffiti scrawled on them and the minimal vegetation in the front was dead. One of the apartments had an old, grease-covered engine block sitting in front of it on the curb, a monument to both someone’s willingness to pollute the neighborhood while fixing a car parked at the curb and the city administration’s indifference to cleaning up the streets.

On the other side of the street the homes were old, but many were well kept. On several fences facing the street I could see where graffiti had been painted over. An older Toyota truck was parked in one driveway and a new Chevrolet was in another. Up the block a garage sale seemed to be in progress. If you ignored the ubiquitous window bars, the side of the street with the homes could be a Beaver Cleaver neighborhood with a salsa beat.

One side of the street represented the old East L.A. of stable families and roots, the other side was the new East L.A. of transients with no stake in this neighborhood, city, or country. I felt proud and sad for the homeowners. Proud because they seemed willing to put up a fight for their neighborhood and sad because I thought the fight would be a losing one. Eventually the neighborhood would succumb to dirt and decay, and the homeowners would start losing their children to the gangs and the street.

I pulled up on the opposite side of the street from Angela’s apartment and contemplated my next move. I’ve seen stakeouts a million times in movies and read about them even more, but the actual mechanics of a stakeout are something I’ve never given a lot of thought to.

I was an Asian sitting in a strange Nissan in a purely Latino section of town. I didn’t have one of those special vans you see in spy movies and I couldn’t afford to rent the proverbial apartment or house that always seems available, at least in fiction, across the street from the location under surveillance.

I stuck out like a sore thumb and the longer I sat there doing nothing the worse it became. I could pull up the block a distance so I wasn’t sitting directly in front of Angela’s apartment, but the people up the block might get alarmed or suspicious about someone sitting in front of their place for hours at a time.

There were also other practical problems to consider. If I left to get food it might be at exactly the time Angela chose to leave her apartment. Of course, I could go hungry, but sooner or later I’d have to go to the bathroom and the same problem would occur. And what if Angela wasn’t in the apartment in the first place? This stakeout wasn’t everything I figured it to be. Or more accurately, I hadn’t figured things out at all when I drove over to her apartment.

At a loss for something more detective-like to do, I got out of the car and walked across the street. I went to the door of her apartment and knocked. Nothing. I knocked a second time and was starting to wonder what to do next when the door was suddenly opened. It gave me a little start, but not as big a start as the person I was confronting.

He was a man in his mid-thirties. He was shorter than me, which meant that he was really short, but what he lacked in height he made up for in muscle. The muscle was easy to see, because he wasn’t wearing a shirt. It was a warm day, but not so hot that you’d expect to find people shirtless, and that surprised me a little. He was wearing scruffy jeans and equally scruffy cowboy boots with pointed toes. He was Latino, with a dark complexion baked a deep brown by exposure to the sun. His hair was greasy and curly, and worn in something that approached an old-fashioned flattop haircut. He did not look friendly.

“What do you want?” he said with a thick accent. A wave of sour beer breath rolled toward me. From the voice I thought it was the same man I talked to on the phone. On one bulging bicep he had a cross tattooed. On the other bicep he had “Jesus” tattooed. I didn’t know if this was an epithet, a prayer, or simply a name.

“Is Angela Sanchez at home? I’d like to speak to her.”

His eyes narrowed. “Who are you?”

“I met Angela a few nights ago and I’d like to talk to her.” I wasn’t anxious to give him my name.

His face darkened. “You think she’s a puta? Is that why you came by? She likes you yellow types, but she comes home to a real man. You understand that?” He poked a stubby finger at me, and I thought he was going to step right into my face. I haven’t been in a fistfight since grade school, but I thought I was going to be in one in about ten seconds. I stepped back and smiled with as friendly a smile as I could muster under the circumstances.

“Hey, there’s no reason to get upset,” I said. “I just wanted to talk to Angela. I really don’t know her.”

He seemed a bit befuddled. I don’t know if the befuddlement was caused by the beer or by my reaction to his aggression. In any case, I decided it was a good time to make my escape with as much dignity as I could muster.

“Tell her I’ll be back,” I said, still smiling as I turned around to walk to my car.

“She’s not here!” he shouted with a combination of anguish and anger that made me sort of believe him.

I walked to the car with my ears alert to the sound of the man running up behind me to attack me. Instead, I heard the door of the apartment slam shut. I started breathing again.

When I got to the car I felt as befuddled as Angela’s boyfriend, husband, relative, or whatever he was. My first attempt at a stakeout was not a success, and I didn’t know what to do next. It occurred to me that if Angela wasn’t there, maybe her friend would go to her and I could follow him. Why he would do that instead of picking up the phone is something that didn’t occur to me at the time. I was still shaken up by the reception I got at the apartment, and I just wasn’t thinking clearly.

I decided to drive up the block and kill some time at the garage sale, keeping the apartment under surveillance.

The garage sale was being monitored by an older Latina and a young girl. The older woman might be in her late fifties or early sixties. She had on a brown cotton dress, and she was sitting on a folding chair. Glasses with a light brown plastic frame were perched on her nose. Next to her, sitting on the ground, was a small portable radio. The announcer on the radio was talking in Spanish, and he seemed to be pitching something hard. I caught the word “Mustang” and realized it must be a car commercial.

The young girl was around nine or ten. She was wearing a white cotton top with a pattern of tiny pink rosebuds. Her hair was in two braids with little pink ribbons at the end, holding the braids together. She had the ubiquitous jeans on, and they weren’t the impossibly large-size jeans held up by a cinched tight belt like the gang-bangers wear. She was sitting on a little camp stool with a patient look that mirrored the older woman’s. Grandmother and granddaughter, I guessed.

I stopped the car and got out. “Hi,” I said to the older woman.

She seemed surprised to see me stop, and nodded to me gravely. She was uncertain about my intentions because she probably saw the incident at Angela Sanchez’s apartment. What else was there to see on that street?

“I’d like to look over the stuff you have for sale,” I said, waving at an array of junk spread out over two tables and also laying on her front lawn. I said that to let her know I wasn’t a salesman. Another grave nod.

On the lawn was used clothing of various sorts. A lot of it was for infants or a very young girl, and I wondered if they were clothes that the young girl helping the woman had outgrown. On the tables were the jumbled collection of old appliances and odds and ends that you see at garage sales, but one item caught my eye, a Japanese samurai sword. Curious, I lifted it off the table and looked at it.

The scabbard was wrapped in fine black silk cords, wound tightly with the thin cords forming a pattern. The hilt of the sword was similarly wrapped, although a few of the cords were frayed. The sword guard was a simple black metal oval, with a grasshopper design in bas-relief on one side of the guard. I pulled the sword slightly out of the scabbard, and was surprised to see that the blade was engraved with a pattern. It looked like a temple sitting next to a river. The other samurai swords I’ve seen had a polished blade, and the only pattern on the blade was a wave or scalloped effect caused by the polishing. I’m not a sword expert, but the engraved blade made me think the sword might be a reproduction.

“This is a nice sword,” I said. Another nod from the old woman. “Could you tell me where you got it?”

“My husband was in the army during World War Two,” she said. “He picked it up right after the war when he was stationed in Japan. I think it’s quite old, but now that my husband’s gone I don’t want to keep it around anymore.” Her English had no accent, and I realized with a jolt that I’ve come to expect an accent from Latinos. It’s the kind of racial stereotype I hate when people have similar expectations about Asians, and I was embarrassed and troubled by my own prejudice.

“How much are you asking for it?” I asked.

She looked at me shrewdly, sizing me up. “A hundred and fifty dollars,” she answered.

I put the sword down. An unemployed person doesn’t need an expensive samurai sword, even though I thought it would make a terrific prop for the L.A. Mystery Club mystery.

“I could go as low as a hundred,” she added when I put the sword down.

“It’s too expensive for me.”

“I can’t go any lower,” she said with a note of finality.

“I’m sure that’s a good price; it’s just more than I can swing right now.”

She looked disappointed, but didn’t seem inclined to reduce the price any more.

I moved over to a pile of books at the end of the table. They were mostly children’s books in both English and Spanish, including a couple of the Nancy Drew mystery books. I reached over to pick one up when I was suddenly shoved from behind.

The push propelled me into the table, jarring it from its position and spilling items to the ground. I spun around, and there was the man from Angela’s apartment.

“How come you still here?” he said belligerently. He held up a large clasp knife and waved it at me.

In Luis Valdez’s play Zoot Suit, the play starts with the narrator, dressed like a 1940’s Chicano zoot-suiter, cutting his way onto the stage with a four-foot switchblade knife. It always gets a laugh because it plays off of an old stereotype about Latinos. The knife before me wasn’t a switchblade, and it wasn’t four feet long. But I can assure you it sure looked that big. And the guy holding it had evidently not been enlightened about the need to fight stereotypes. And I wasn’t laughing.

Before I could say anything the old woman jumped up and started yelling in Spanish. The young girl ran for the house. My Spanish is almost nonexistent, but I got the impression that after she told the girl to run into the house she started berating the man with the knife.

He looked at her, then back at me. She must have been giving him a withering tongue-lashing, because he seemed to shrink back from the onslaught of her words. She was brave, defending a stranger from a knife-wielding drunk. When he looked at her again I reached on the table and picked up the samurai sword. I withdrew it from its scabbard, and when the man returned his attention to me, his eyes widened at the sight of me standing there with a real four-foot blade. He took a step back, which was a very good sign.

Emboldened by his retreat, the woman came around the table, still berating the man and shaking a finger at him. His ridiculous sense of machismo wouldn’t let him make a retreat without having the last word, and he said something in Spanish to the woman, then said to me, “Don’t come back.”

Then he backed into the street, keeping a wary eye on the sword in my hand. He backed up almost all the way to his apartment, then turned around and retreated inside, slamming the door.

The woman and I looked at each other, and we started laughing. It wasn’t laughter caused by amusement, at least on my part. It was laughter caused by relief.

“What’s that guy’s problem?” I asked.

“He’s just bad. He drinks too much, and I think his girlfriend left him. Do you want my granddaughter to call the police?”

I considered that a moment, then I said, “No. Thanks to you and this,” I lifted up the sword, “no harm was done. I’m glad that guy carries a knife instead of a gun. Are you going to be all right? I mean, he won’t bother you because of this, will he?”

The woman snorted. It was a sound that eloquently expressed her contempt for the knife-waving neighbor.

I put the sword back into the scabbard, and I noted with interest that my hands weren’t shaking. If asked, I’d have predicted an incident like this would have left me shaking like a leaf. Instead I seemed unusually lucid and alive.

I helped the woman put the dropped merchandise back on the table, keeping a wary eye on the apartment door. When I was done I decided that my first stakeout had certainly been eventful but not successful. But I did confirm that Angela wasn’t at her apartment, which made me think she might be the woman I saw in Matsuda’s room. Now the question was why she wasn’t in her apartment. Was she scared or involved with Matsuda’s murder or was it coincidental because she just wanted to dump her repulsive boyfriend/pimp/lover? I could add those questions to all the others I had. In fact, I even thought of another. I wondered if the police could be wrong about the murder weapon and if a large knife, like the one just waved under my nose, could have caused the wounds to Matsuda’s body, instead of a sword.

While on the subject of swords, I looked at the samurai sword that had so recently come to my rescue.

“How much did you say you wanted for that sword?”

“A hundred dollars.”

“Will you take a check?”